62. How are you handling your stress?

www.heididawson.com @theheididawson on Instagram I am wondering how YOU are doing. How are you handling the changes we have been through? How are you handling 2020? It has been a year full of twists and turns for pretty much everyone. There are those that have been hit harder than others. For most, I think anxiety has been pretty high. If you already had stress in your life, 2020 probably isn’t helping with that. Some of us are terrified of getting Covid and some of us are terrified of losing our job. Some are worried about how to manage the kids being home for school and others are trying to explain to our children why they have to wear a mask and can’t hug anyone. Im a hugger so I feel ya! Some are upset we are having to wear masks and others are upset because some aren’t taking things as serious as they are. But you know what? Every single person including YOU is doing the very best with what they have been given. I sometimes get upset over the thought of someone mandating I have to wear a mask. I had to do some soul searching as to why it bothered me so much. I realized that growing up in a religion that enforced strict rules where you were publicly shamed for not following them makes me a little sensitive to certain rules as an adult. But, You wouldn’t know that if you walked past me on the street. I can remember a time, when I was a young teenager I had a role in front of hundreds of people at a one of our church events, it was an all day event and my part was in the afternoon. At that time, girls would put gel in there hair to make it kind of curly so it had kind of a wet look. I thought it looked great and I was nervous and excited about my part. At lunch break my dad pulled me aside and said that the minister that was head of the event, didn’t like that my hair had the wet look so I needed to brush it out in order to still keep my part. If you are a girl you understand how awful that looked and how insecure I felt at that point. That was just one minor example of the strict rules I grew up with. So I carry beliefs from my past that make the mask mandate a little harder but you wouldn’t know that, if you past by me on the street. Another person has an elderly mother and father that lives with them and so wearing a mask to them is crucial and in their eyes means the difference between life and death for their parents…but, again, you wouldn’t know that either if you passed them on the street. What I’m trying to say, we NEVER know what someone else is struggling with or why they are struggling. Especially strangers. We are all carrying a certain set of beliefs, certain ideas that have been wired into our brain depending on how and where we were raised.